Can Creativity Kill? 04/24/2010
 Are your art activities sedentary? Do not Allow A Sedentary Job to Kill You. Art does not have to be sedentary. You can have a balanced, healthy, slim and creative life. I intend to make this creative and fit, lifestyle, my future. I want to see other creative people maintain their health so they can do their best creative work well into their advanced years. People who sit at a desk for six hours a day are almost twice as likely to be overweight. I would spend six hours a day in sedentary creative work and know the need to ensure that this does not cause health problems and obesity. I m learning to balance, my love of a creative sedentary job,(my creative skills of writing and painting), with fitness training. First, I had to decrease the amount of time I spent in my sedentary work as my fitness, was gained slowly. Initially by gentle movement in water, not a huge calorie burner, so I needed to do a lot of that exercise to make any appreciable difference in my energy expenditure. This meant a lot less time available for sedentary creativity. Then I moved on to walking, again, from walking to weight work outs, then full body work outs as I gained strength and flexibility and now all of a sudden I find I can jog. This is the breakthrough I need as I can now allocate an hour a day to a huge calorie burn aerobic exercise session. I combine this with healthy portion controlled eating and offset some of the lowered metabolism my creative, sedentary lifestyle had been doing to me. It took me three years and almost three months to increase my fitness to this level where I know I can return to a lot of the sedentary lifestyle of the writer and painter, and be able to balance it with enough aerobic exercise that I will not find myself gaining weight during an intense painting or writing session again. All I need to do is to remember to take care of myself physically and not just my inner passion for my art. Small but important ways I can nurture the physical me is in taking time to use night creams, see a hair stylist a little more often, make sure I have good quality runners and clothes suitable for jogging. Here is a great article in Sparkpeople, with tips to avoid allowing a sedentary job to cause you to gain weight.  Blogger-Jogger; Achieving the balance. Where the B_____ H___ are We? 03/17/2010
 Reg and I just returned from a steady paced nine-kilometre bush walk, up and down hills. The instructions in the map said to ask at the General store in the country town for the detailed map. We did, and the storeowner was rather vague about the walk, said it had, just been cleared, so it was passable and she had no brochures left. We set of, happily, in the direction she said, to go and this was backed up by the information on the map we carried so we were quite happy at that stage.  As I got within view of the mountain range we were supposed to scale in what was described, on the map, as a medium difficulty walk and rock scramble, I was having a few doubts about Reg’s choice of a walk, I did not think he was ready to tackle it.  After four kilometres and still nowhere near the mountain range base, I could see that, the information on the map was incorrect. This was no 3.8 kilometre walk over a mountain range as we had already covered a greater distance than that and I was concerned looking at the steepness of the mountain about Reg’s ability to climb it, so I suggested we turn back. Reg agreed that was a good idea. It proved to be a very good idea.  We were walking back the way we thought we had come, when we got to one of the many forks in the unsignposted, bush track and Reg, wanted to go to the right and I wanted to go left. He was so certain, I let him lead, and I think he was actually right at that point, I am not sure where we took the wrong turn. I knew there was a main road out on our left somewhere and we could always find our way out, by turning left. Just the same, when you begin to walk through areas you have not seen before on unsignposted bush tracks I do find it unnerving. Lol, we were not lost, we just had no idea, J, exactly where we were  We were within 5 kilometres of a little country store, somewhere vaguely to the left, or was that left right or right left? I steered us left and we found a road, not one we knew, this took us to the main road, not sure which way to turn from there, left or right, we turned right, knowing we could stop a car and ask if we needed to. Reg by now was favouring one leg, it had been the longest walk he has done since before he got whooping Cough last August. I was doing fine, the little bit of anxiety at not being sure where we were, had gone, now we were on the main road. Heaps of relief, when the little general store, appeared in the distance. Funny, but as I reached the car, my energy flagged. I felt ready to flop  To think that back in my thirties I never considered going for a two-hour brisk walk and healthy portion controlled eating as the way to becoming and maintaining a slim body, no I looked for solutions that took the work away from me. Diet pills, generic adipex, I think are versions of the phentermine drug, type, products I used to pop, hoping they could make me slim. What a long way, I have come since then. Reg and I probably should have turned back sooner, or not even have gone on that walk when the directions were so vague. I did follow the safety rule of making sure someone knew where we were going, by telling the people in the general store we were going to do the walk and I left our car parked in sight of the store so people would have known if we had had a problem and not returned. While the walk was not as we expected, we both feel great now, knowing we had a great exercise session, and we are both steadily improving in fitness each day with the exercise challenges we are giving ourselves.  I have illustrated this blog post about today’s walk with images of the art fridge magnets I have made from landscape paintings I have done. I saw some views, today, I would love to paint. How will I paint it, Impressionist style or romantic realist? I favour impressionist style and Reg and most of the public prefer romantic realism. When I begin a painting, the scene dictates to me, how it wants to be painted.  Fat Art! 12/21/2009
 Visual images speak louder than words. "If you don't move, you get fat”. That is a message that as a creative person I need to keep in mind. Painting and writing are mainly sedentary activities and I need to find ways to make them more active. I do this by painting on my feet, walking back and forth to view my work from a distance. I get out on my feet to research stories I write. Even so, a lot of the work is far more inactive than is good for me and I need to plan activity breaks in my day and not allow my obsession for my creativity to take over and deprive me of exercise, or for that matter sleep. Therefore, once I post this fabulous visual image and reminder of why I strive to remember to be active, I will say goodnight :-), Apparently this statute, and another of Lincoln grown portulant just sitting all these years in his chair at the Lincoln Monument for too long, was part of an advertising campaign by Advertising Agency: Scholz & Friends, Hamburg, Germany | Kathy Shell on Facebook What is RSS
Kathy Shell, Australian
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